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Have a think about where you learned to do anger.
Maybe it was your old man. The way he went off, the way the house braced for a blow up when he did. Maybe it was the footy players you grew up idolising, spitting the dummy the second a call went against them. Somewhere along the line you got shown what a man’s anger looks like, and you took it on without ever choosing it. You’re still running that version now.
Anger is a normal emotion doing a normal job. It gets a bad rap from the way it comes out, and from what’s driving it. Uncomfortably, the first step is to take a good hard look at yourself. You’re repeating what you were shown, and it isn’t working. Not on your kids, not on your marriage, not on you.
Underneath the anger is the stuff that’s hard to acknowledge, let alone feel. You’ve got rules about how things should be, how you should be treated, what you should be able to handle. When something breaks one of them, what you feel first is smaller and harder to admit. Disrespected. Shown up. Not in control. That feels like an attack, so the anger comes in hard and fast and covers it before you have to sit with it.
Named plainly, it’s often fear or shame. Fear that you’re not enough. Shame that you’ve been found out. Most blokes never learn to hear those two words about themselves, let alone say them, and learning to is a big part of this. You can’t work with what you won’t look at.
There’s a reason you can’t catch any of it before it fires. You’re maxed out. You’ve been running near the top of your range for months, revs high, and you stopped hearing the engine a long time ago. At the red-line, the smallest thing tips you over, and there’s no room left to feel the build before the lid blows.
The work builds from there.
You learn to catch the thought before it turns to anger, while there’s still room to do something with it. And when you’re still angry anyway, because sometimes you will be and that’s okay, you learn to show it in a way that actually works. It’s the same emotion, but it’s working for you instead of running you.
That stuck feeling, knowing this isn’t working and having no idea how to change it, has a name. It’s a kind of no man’s land, and most men sit in it for years because no one ever showed them the way out.
If this seems familiar and you’d like to have a chat, the first 15-minute consult is free.
FAQs
Not the version you’re picturing. Anger management usually drills you on controlling the blow-up as it happens. This work goes further back, to what’s driving it and why you’re maxed out, so there’s less building up to control.
Do you only work with men in Perth?
Most of the men I work with are in Perth, but sessions run online, right across Australia. You don’t need to be local.
What happens in a first session?
We start with what’s in front of you right now. No couch, no hour digging through your childhood. A straight conversation about what’s going on and what’s driving it.
